4 Cornerstones of Achievement

People always ask me, brendan, how do you know if someone's going to succeed? You know, are there like components to achievement that you're looking for? How do you know if one of your clients or those that you lead, or even yourself, if you're going to do a good job, if there's real achievement going to happen and you know, if someone's going to get progress towards something? I mean, what are the building blocks of achievement? Well, I don't think I'm the first person to take a shot at this. I think over a period of time, this is the entire self help, personal development, professional development, continuing education market is all about that simple question, what can we do to have more success and achievement in our lives? I've learned from so many of the greats out there. I'm a product of this industry more than anything else. You know, I'm one of its worst students, but I try really hard, right? So it's like, what is it? What's it take to succeed? Well, I'm not the first person to say it, but, you know, the number one first thing we have to have to achieve anything is desire. We have to want it. Les Brown used to say, you have to be hungry. You know, you have to be hungry to succeed. You have to have a deep desire to move the needle of your life forward. You have to have a desire for a dream, for a mission, for a cause, for something that you believe in that is pulling you forward because you care about it so much. And a lot of people say, well, Brenda, I don't care about anything. I'm like, oh, is there a worse place to be in life when you just have desire for nothing? I mean, isn't that ultimately where we fall into suffering or depression or loneliness, or we've fallen into the negative lights of the world? That there's darker shades of experience of life, and it's not by accident. We all feel like some people who say, I have no desire, Brendan, as if they're a victim. Can you believe it? It's like they act like it's the fault of the world. Well, nobody gave me any desire for anything. Look, maturity and enlightenment in life demands we decide who do we want to be in life? What is it we want our life to stand for? What is it we desire to go after? And some people say, well, I just don't know, Brendan. And they say, well, I don't have any vision for my life, Brendan, so I don't have that desire. Well, yeah, well, guess what? You're never going to have any vision for your life unless you go see something, right? If you've never seen the world, it's hard to have a vision for yourself. You have to get outside of your house, get away from the damn computer, go into the world and say, what's this about? What are people doing? To have vision for yourself, sometimes you have to experience a bunch of different things to know what you really care for. To sample different things and say, oh, this is what I like. Oh, that's what I want. You might not always know it. No one wakes up in the morning, knows exactly, exactly. Like someday you just wake up in your life like, oh, this is what I desire of life. Desire is built on experience. Desire is built on exposure to things. So go explore the world, read books, ask people what they do, see what's out there. But we have to have desire. We have to be hungry for achievement and success. Not just to have achievement and success, not just for the ends of that experience of. Of money, wealth, status, fame, power, satisfaction, pride. Those things will come. But we have to have the desire for that journey to grow into the type of person who would deserve such a lofty goal, to grow into the persons who would deserve the experience of those things, to really desire that journey. Right? I desire the struggle and. And the challenge and the hardship of life that's gonna make me a better person. I don't shy away from the stormy seas and sit at harbor watching life go by and think, oh, boy, you know, hopefully someday I can. No, it's like set sail, man. Have a desire to reach a new destination. If you can't do it for yourself, cultivate desire to serve. Desire to give something extraordinary to the people around you, to take care of your family, to reach you and your family up to another level of joy and significance and feeling and just, frankly, abundance in your life. It's not about having desire to gain wealth, but maybe that is true. And there's nothing wrong with desire for wealth. People make that such a bad thing these days. Desire for wealth does not necessarily mean greed. They're two different things. Desire for wealth. I desire the wealth, that of health. I desire the wealth of meaningful relationships. I desire all the riches of those softer sides of life. You know, love, compassion, kindness, connection, contribution, consciousness. I desire those things. And once you have desire for something, you will work for it, right? Determination will only come if you have desire. You must desire something. You want it. You desire, you're excited about it. You do, you have enthusiasm. I wake up. If you have no enthusiasm, it's because you probably haven't targeted something said, I'm going to work towards that thing. I'm going to work towards not only achieving that thing, but becoming a better person along the way. And I think that's what gives us great desire. I desire to develop greater knowledge, skills, ability, talents in my life so that not only can I feel that sense of mastery, personal power and mastery, but that sense of contribution. By honing those skills, those knowledge, those tools, those talents, I know I can serve, I can make a better difference. If I become a better person in my own life, I know I'm a better man for my wife. I know I'm a better man for my family. I'm a better son, I'm a better brother. I am a better leader. I'm better contributor. I hope for you. I desire that. So that gets me going. I think the second element of all of achievement is direction. You know, you might have that desire. A lot of people have a big desire or even a small desire. They say, well, you know, my desire is to lose weight or to quit smoking, or I desire to learn this skill set over here, or my desire is to build a business over here or to make money over there. But whatever their desire is and that ultimate ambition or purpose, goal, mission, whatever you want to call it, I just call it desire. For now, you gotta have direction, which is how do you get there, you know? And a lot of people have a lot of desire, but they won't do the hard work that demands learning to stretch their competency, you know, to get direction from other people. Say, hey, guys, this is what I want to achieve? How, hey, everybody, this is what I want. Is there a class I can take? Is there a book I can read? Is there a webinar I can attend? Is there a course I can take online? Is there somebody who can mentor me? Is there somebody who's achieved this? I can read their biography. I mean, to chase down how other people have done something, to model others, to mimic their steps and the strategies they followed, to learn from others so that we know the path. You know, in Montana, we have this saying. The time to have the map is before you enter the woods. You know, a lot of people right now in their life, they feel lost, restless, frustrated. And often it's because they never got direction at the beginning of the journey. They just wandered into some big field of opportunity, wandered around, and they've been looking around, and now they're struggling. They're upset, they're frustrated, they don't know where to go because they never said, hey, everybody, does anyone have a map for achieving this thing? They just do what our culture, at least here in North America often celebrates, which is they had an idea, they had a desire, and they did what. They just, you know, threw stuff at the fan to see if it stuck, as they say, right? They just, they just tried without any knowledge, information or wisdom gathering. You know, if you have a desire, go out, interview people on how to have that, to achieve that, to accomplish that, ask lots of questions, be a student of life. Even experts are always students first. You know, I'm so unbelievably happy with where my career is and what I get to do and how I get to serve people all around the world. I'm asked to come and speak on motivation, high performance, leadership, marketing and business. I mean, all day long I'm asked to do these things. I'm honored. I'm thrilled by. I'm seen as my career, in my expertise and in my industry, as one of the leaders of what I do. I appreciate that and I love that. But I always say I'm just a student man. Here, let me share with all these lessons I've learned. Let me share with you. Oh, have you read this book? Have you done this course? Oh, go follow this person over there. I'm always curating all the content in my area, not just so that I know what's going on, but to continually provide me fresh new direction, new ideas, new strategies, to continually moving towards my desires. I'm never complete. None of us are. We're always learning. So if you really desire something, you need a map. You need to get direction. And then you need. Once you have that direction, you have that third component of all achievement, which is discipline. You're going to have to work and you have to be more consistent than you ever imagined possible if you're going to make your ultimate desires come true. And we all know that, right? But how easy is it not to be disciplined? But it's like I always say, when you knock on the door of opportunity, it is work. Who answers? You need a high level of discipline each and every single day. You need to set up repeated habits, repeated sort of methods and practices in your life that you do over and over and over again to move you towards your desire. You need to check in on them to make sure that you have the right direction. Right? Because if you're disciplined towards the wrong direction, you're really just distracted, which we'll talk about. But we need to make sure that you have a real set of Disciplines, people who want to get fit, they have to be disciplined to work out every day or every other day. It's vital for them. It's a real discipline. If you want to mastery any area of your life, you need to work it consistently. If you're just doing it once in a while, not only do you risk becoming just a dabbler in life, but you absolutely ensure your inability to accomplish mastery and long term growth and success and achievement in your life. Discipline is required. You don't see any high level achieving person in any area who doesn't have an extraordinary amount of self discipline. They are absolutely committed to their habits and practices that positively support them on their path to desires. So sit down tonight. Pen and paper. Remember pension? Yeah. So sit down with those and say, okay, what discipline could I set up in my life that I'm going to do consistently? Every day I'm going to study these things. Every day I'm going to try these things. Every day I'm going to ask these types of questions. Every day I'm going to try to be this type of person. Every day I'm going to go to the gym. Every day I'm going to do whatever it is for you. You set it up as a discipline and you try to meet that every single day. That's where a lot of achievement comes from. You know, a lot of achievement looks easy and they say, well, you know, they're so lucky. A lot of people watch my videos and send it in all day long. Brendan, you're so good on video. You got so good at this. And I'm like, well, thanks. I'm still working at it. I'm still a student, I'm still trying. But what they don't see is I've tried this so many times. I've done so many videos. I don't have to think these are unscripted. I don't have a script, I'm not reading a teleprompter. This is literally me sitting in a high chair talking to. I have a topic in my mind and I just go. I'm able to do that now because I've trained myself with discipline to be able to speak extemporaneously. I started in college when the first time I ever spoke in front of people I threw up. I was so nervous literally on the way over that I threw up. I was terrified to talk, terrified. But I thought, if I'm going to make a difference in the world, I'm going to have to learn to become a master communicator. I'm gonna have to be dedicated towards that. So I discipline myself. It's not easy for me to come in the studio now. I run, you know, huge, huge brands online. I've got multi million dollar courses and books and programs and speeches and webinars. My business, you know, it demands a lot. It's not easy for me to do these videos anymore but I love them and I've disciplined myself. I said, nope, we're gonna do videos. And I clear the schedule, I come in, I can do this now because I've trained myself, I've disciplined to do so many videos. My first, well, many of you will say this video sucks too. That's okay. Some of you will tell me I keep getting those hashtag douchebags but you know, I get a lot of those. But it's the discipline of doing this and making it fun along the way. Discipline is not a negative thing. It's a joyful habit of pursuing your dreams. That's the way I look at discipline. It's just a joyful habit of constantly pursuing my dreams. And that's why I've gotten good at the things that I care about and I desire of life. Same thing in your personal life. I have discipline to get present for the people around me. As soon as I see someone's eyes, I remind myself be present. Brendon. It's a constant challenge and discipline for me to remind myself to be present, to be engaged, to be connected, to be interested in other people, to learn from them, to respect them, to love them. It's a discipline. It makes you a good human being to have good discipline even in that realm of human relationships. And you have to have those. The last piece and it does require a lot of discipline too. The last component I would say that are critical to be able to predict if you will succeed, if other people succeed. It's so simple. It is absolutely powerful. You must have distraction radar. You must be fantastic about managing distraction because everything's gonna get in your way but you got this desire. Everything will conspire often to get in your way. Other people will give you their agenda and their emergencies and their needs. The world will throw up this emergency, this challenge, this problem. The world will toss in front of you 50 new blue links, 300 new emails, a thousand new posts to read. There's so much that you could be consumed by. Your job is to have that desire. Your job is to have direction of how to get there. Your job is have discipline in working towards it. And so much of commitment today means minimizing removing distraction, get rid of it. You don't need to watch all those television shows. You really don't miss, miss just two or three or four of them. You're not going to wake up one day and go, you know, you're not going to freak out. It's not going to be a horrible withdrawal. Stop watching so much television. If you do, if you do. But most of us are distracted three, four, five hours a day. Really. I mean the average American watches four hours of television a day. Four hours of television a day. Over the course of the average adult American life, a span that's somewhere around 13 years of their life, 24, seven in front of a television. You think about that. They lost over a decade of their life. I mean at an average salary, they've lost near a million dollars of potential earning power. But even if it's not about money, I mean think about the reality. They lost 13 years of life, of exploring new places, of learning new languages and talents and skills, of giving, of creating, of being with their loved ones, of mentoring their children for what? For four hours of distraction to television. And maybe, you know, television isn't your drug, but for a lot of people their drug, it's, you know, it's the computer, it's, I call it browser blackout. They start watching this thing and they watch that thing, they watch that thing, they watch that thing. And I know it's dangerous me telling you this because maybe this is your distraction for the day, I get it. But I hope that if you're watching me, it becomes a purposeful habit to grow your mind, to re fire your motivation to keep yourself on path in life. Choose to watch me. Don't just like randomly bump into me. Even if you randomly bump into me today, you get this choice. Do I subscribe? Do I not? I hope you do. But if you don't, no sweat. I want you to stay disciplined on your path of learning. And I want not to be a distraction, but to be somebody who's empowering people better direction to re fire their desire, to re aim who they are and what they're about. So you have to choose. You have to consume the right things that are going to support you on your path to success. If you'll do that untold, you get a decade of your life back. A decade. Just removing four hours of distraction. How do you do that? You wake up in the morning, say what do I desire today? What is my direction? What am I going to do today? How am I going to be disciplined today? What distractions can I remove from my life? And that's when you start feeling like you're getting progress in life, you know? That's when you start feeling like, wow, I'm knocking off these steps to get towards my ideal. That's when you start to feel like you're really moving forward in life. Life becomes more energized and engaged. You're more enthusiastic for tomorrow because you know you control your destiny. You know what you after and internally you feel such a magnificent spark and fire each and every single day. That's how we experience the charge life.